CAF's River tonight, Bruce Goff's Ford House tour, plus architects' waterCOLOR, Sun-Times photographers See What You Missed - more for July.

There are so many great architectural tours around, from the Chicago Architecture Foundation and others, that we usually don't include them, but one this Saturday has just made the July Calendar of Chicago Architecture Events.

This Saturday, July 13th, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy is sponsored a tour of 's Ford House in Aurora, with owner Sidney Robinson on hand to talk about his home and answer questions.  Tickets are $20.00 for members; $35.00 non-members, and there's a special deal for $10.00 tickets to Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House just down the road in Plano.

Bruce Goff

Elsewhere, Spontaneous Interventions, the great show at the Chicago Cultural Center, has added a number of related events, including a Tuesday July 16th panel, Design for the Just City: Neighborhoods and Community Participation, with Marshall Brown, Andre Brumfield, Daniel D'Oca, Liz Ogbu and Terry Schwartz, with Toni Griffin moderating. Then on Friday the 19th, there'll be a debate at the Theaster Gate's new Washington Park Arts Incubator with Steve Rasmusen Cancian, Cauleen Smith and others TBA on the topic of Do artists and designers contribute to gentrification? What Can We Do About It?

Today, Thursday the 11th, is logjam day on this month's calendar, with John Eifler talking about Wright's Search for Innovation in Design at Fourth Presbyterian's Gratz Center at lunchtime, an an evening panel discussion at CAF, A River Runs Through It: Developing and Designing Chicago's Second Shoreline, with Doug Farr, Benet Haller and others, while at the Music Institute of Chicago, there's be another panel with Stuart Cohen, Jack Weiss, Heidi Hoppe, Kris Hartzell and Laura Saviano on Evanston Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Design: 1880 to 2012, in conjunction with the new book, Evanston: 150 years, 150 Places.

On Thursday alone, there are half a dozen great items, and no fewer than 30 dates still to come this month.  Check them all out on the July Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

And a couple of off-calendar items . . .

waterCOLOR skyScape. This Sunday, July 14th, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., will mark the opening of an exhibition of works by everyOther, “a bi-weekly watercolor group founded in the Spring of 2011 by Phil Enquist, Peter Landon and Cynthia Winter.”  The reception takes place at the historic Brushwood

home in Ryerson Woods forest preserve in north suburban Riverwoods.

En plein air painting is the focus of this group of Chicago architects, artists and designers . . . They have painted at Ryerson Woods, the Lily Pond, Lurie Garden, Kiley Garden, Ping Tom Park, Goose Island, Olive Park and inside the Lincoln Park Conservatory on a rainy day; they sketch river bridges, concrete edifices, steel and glass towers, old limestone, local brick, snowshadows, piers, prairie grass, lakebirds, and sky. 

The exhibition runs through August 30th. More information here. 

See What You Missed.

Keep In Flight-Rainbow, John H. White.

Also at the exact same date and time - Sunday, July 14th, 1:00 to 3:00 p.m. - there will an opening reception for See What You Missed, an exhibition of the work of Sun-Times photojournalists,  whose department was eliminated and all the staff fired by the paper at the end of May.    The show, curated by former Tribune photographers Charles Osgood and José Moré, features the work Pulitizer-Prize winner John H. White and his colleagues, and runs through July 28th at the Chicago Photography Center, 3301 North Lincoln.  Information here.

Broken Windows at Polish Triangle, Anne Mallek on English Arts and Crafts - more events added as July calendar heats up

OK, the 4th on a Wednesday has somehow morphed into a holiday weekend, so there's not much going on until next Tuesday, and after that, things heat up with new addition to the July Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

This coming Tuesday, July 9th, taking place at 6:00 p.m. at Polish Triangle on Milwaukee,  Division, and Ashland and Broken Windows: Writers Examine the Human Element in Urban Design, with stories from Paul Durica, Maribel Mares and Sara Ross and an open mic (sign-up begins at 5:30 p.m.)  Earlier (3:00 to 5:00 p.m., to be exact) in the same location Katherine Darnstadt  of Latent Design will lead a Broken Windows Place Making Workshop.  No actual windows will be harmed in either event.

On Thursday, the 25th, Anne Mallek, curator at Greene and Greene's Gamble House in Pasadena, will be at the Pritzker Auditorium in the Monroe Building to lecture on “Good Houses and Good Books”: The English Arts and Crafts Movement in America.  Among the major players in the movement were English designer Charles Robert Ashbee, and, in America, Frank Lloyd Wright, whose son took the picture of Ashbee you see here.

Getting back to this coming week, the Chicago Center on Green Technology has a Wednesday session on Accelerating Sustainability in Chicago's 77 Community Areas,  while lunchtime on Thursday the 11th John Eifler talks about (Frank Lloyd) Wright's Search for Innovation in Design at Fourth Presbyterian's Gratz Center.

On Thursday evening, the Chicago Architecture Foundation sponsors A River Runs Through It: Developing and Designing Chicago's Second Shoreline, a panel discussion with Benet Haller, John Quail, Tom D'Arcy, Doug Farr and moderator Josh Ellis.  Same evening, CCGT offers a preview of this year's GreenBuilt Home Tour, and at the Music Institute of Chicago (in Evanston, ironically enough) there's another panel discussion/book signing for the just published Evanston: 150 Years, 150 Places, with Stuart Cohen, Jack Weiss, Heidi Hoppe, Kris Hartzell and Laura Saviano.

Event-wise, July is really just getting started, so check out the three dozen great items to come on the July Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.

Chicago Debates Wrigley, A River Runs Through it at CAF, Evanston Design, Robert Ivy, Jewels in July, Architecture 101 on Jeju Island and more. Don't leave town - it's the July Calendar!

Where'd everybody go?

It's full-up summer, and a number of institutions have gone on hiatus for July and August, but for those of us who haven't abandoned the city for our summer homes in Ocean Springs, there's still nearly three dozen great items on the July Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.  (There's also eleven fascinating exhibitions - from Alfonso and Margaret Iannelli, to The Rendered Image, to Take Me to River and more, and we've got information on all these, as well.)

The month gets off to a late start, with this Fourth of July holiday week featuring only Radiant Cooling for Commercial Projects at the CCGT, but things start heating up after that, with Accelerating Sustainability in Chicago's 77 Community Areas at CCGT on Tueday the 9th, and then a panel discussion, A River Runs Through It: Developing and Designing Chicago's Shoreline, with Doug Farr, Benet Haller and others at the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which is also sponsoring the latest in its series of Chicago Debates: Wrigley Fast Pitch: Renovation Wreck or Refreshed Design, at Moe's Cantina  on Clark on Monday the 15th.

John Eifler will talk about Wright's Search for Innovation in Design at Fourth Presbyterian's Gratz Center on Thursday, the 11th,  the same day the CCGT offers up Previewing the GreenBuilt Home Tour, and AIA/Chicago and Design Evanston has a panel discussion with Stuart Cohen, Jack Weiss, Laura Saviano and others on Evanston Architecture, Urbanaism and Landscape Design: 1880 to 2012, tying into the just published Evanston: 150 Years, 150 Places. On Saturday, the 13th, AIA Chicago offers a daytrip to the John DeSalvo Design's Jett Residence.

Archi-treasures annual Jewels in July takes place on Wednesday, the 17th, while Thursday the 19th, USGBC Illinois offers Hartshorne Plunkard's Megan Zack, dbHMS's Sachin Anand and M&R Development's Paul Marucci discussing Parc Huron, the first LEED Gold certified high-rise apartment building in Illinois.  AIA/Chicago offers a tour of Joe Valerio's U of C Laboratory School Early Childhood Center on the 18th, and Revolution Brewery on the 19th.

Sunday the 20th, CCGT offers From Debris to Elegance: A Metamorphosis of Timber Frame Construction, and on Tuesday the 23rd, former Architectural Record editor and current AIA CEO Robert Ivy delivers the keynote, Design Excellence in Affordable Housing: The Multiplier Effect, to this year's Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute, at a public-welcome Cultural Center event which will also feature the presentation of awards to New York's Via Verde and Chicago's La Casa.  On Thursday and Friday, the 25th and 26th, this year's Complete Streets Symposium takes place at CTA HQ.
The month finishes up on a romantic note with a free Cultural Center screening of Architecture 101, the breakout South Korean hit film about a 35-year old architect being asked by a long-lost first love to rebuild her home on Jeju Island.

And there's a lot more.  So spending the month in a Chicago seemingly stuck in a holding pattern alternating between broiling and freezing, monsoons on the side, isn't really so bad when you can check out all the great items on the July Calendar of Chicago Architectural Events.